Meet The Guy Who Has Totally Reinvented Bloomberg Businessweek's Design

Richard Turley, Bloomberg Businessweek's 34-year-old creative director. Bloomberg Bloomberg's Businessweek relaunch has been impressive. The stories are interesting, new editor Josh Tyrangiel has made some big editorial hires, and Bloomberg is even executing on the tech side with a great new iPad app.

But what has captured our attention the most is the magazine's new design, under creative director Richard Turley.

And apparently something is working under Bloomberg's watch. During the first three months of 2011, ad revenue at Businessweek was up 65% year-over-year, according to MPA, while Forbes and Fortune were both flattish.

Turley, a 34-year-old Brit, joined Bloomberg from The Guardian in London, where he had worked for pretty much his entire career, he told us during a recent interview at Bloomberg's Manhattan headquarters.

Here's a lightly edited transcript of our chat, where Turley tells us a little about his design inspiration at Bloomberg Businessweek.

An eye-grabbing cover design. More → Bloomberg Businessweek Business Insider: How did you end up at Bloomberg Businessweek of all places?

Richard Turley: One Monday morning I was in work kind of early and the phone rang and there's this guy Jim Kelly at the other end of the line. Jim was [the retired] managing editor of Time and he was doing some consultancy for Norm Pearlstine here to recruit an editor and an art director.

Initially the conversation was just, "would you like to redesign the magazine?" So I pitched with a couple other people, and I won that pitch just before Christmas the year before last.

If I'm being honest, I didn't actually think I would win the pitch. I was up against Luke Hayman, and people like that, who are kind of quite big names in the design industry, and I thought that they were probably going to go with somebody like that. But I wanted to make a good enough impression that I would maybe get the job.

What were some of the main points of your concept for the magazine?

I think maybe the biggest thing was the typeface.

It's kind of a nerdy thing to concentrate on. Using Helvetica is a little bit risky because it's such a well known typeface, and you kind of see it everywhere.

Bloomberg's cover and story about Larry Page taking back the reins as Google CEO. More → Bloomberg Businessweek What should a business magazine look like in 2011?

It should look like a magazine.

You kind of have to celebrate the fact that you're on paper and that there's a certain narrative drive to the structure of a magazine, which people like and respond to.

You start with small bits at the front, and work through to bigger things; the narrative arc of that. You dip in and out in a magazine in a much different way than you dip in and out of things on the Internet.

One of the things I wanted to do was to have a magazine which you could graze. The idea that you could have two different kinds of reading experiences. One where you just flick through it. There's a lot of ways of getting into articles, there's a lot of things going on the page that hopefully catch your eye. So you can have a rich reading experience without actually reading the magazine. But, if you want to read the magazine, there's a lot there to read.

Most people engage in a magazine in both of those ways at different times. I think most people probably pick up a magazine, flick through it, look at the things they want to read, put it down, and then pick it up again when they've got some time to engage in the longer articles.

An especially provocative cover, for a story about AshleyMadison.com. More → Bloomberg Businessweek You seem to be... daring with the photos and layout, especially the cover.

I guess we play around and experiment quite a lot, and because we're a weekly magazine, those experiments often end up in print in a way that maybe they don't in a monthly magazine. And because it's quite a long magazine, and we need a lot of ideas to sustain it, you have more license to experiment.

We have this thing when we're talking called "noble failure," where we really try and kind of press an idea and not be pissed off if it doesn't make it. We experiment and just see if it happens, and I guess 50-60% of the time that ends up in the magazine. But there's a good chance when things don't work, we've pushed it too far and have to come back.

I know it's kind of corny to say this, but we have a really good team. It kind of happened at quite a good time, when I came over and we recruited the whole art team. Because there's not a huge amount of investment in print magazines at the moment. Though I think it's improved since then.

A very cool chart: 365 days of Steve Jobs. More → Bloomberg Businessweek When you're designing the magazine, do you think at all how it will appear on digital platforms, like an iPad?

My day-to-day job is to do the print magazine. The digital side of things, I have input and I feed into that, but this is my focus basically. So I don't particularly think of the iPad.

Does it seem like Bloomberg has put more of a premium on design than the former owners of Businessweek?

I think perhaps more at heart was that there wasn't a great deal of energy at the magazine. And I think that's what Bloomberg and Josh particularly has brought to the magazine, is just a bit of life.

I don't have a great deal of experience of working at a magazine that is not really doing so well, but I would imagine it as being fairly demoralizing, and not a particularly happy place to work. And I would assume that a not particularly happy place to work isn't the best place to produce incredible journalism.

And I think when Bloomberg bought the magazine -- again, I wasn't here when that transition happened -- but I would have thought that what was initially daunting was actually quite exciting, for someone to come along and say, this is a good magazine, this is a magazine that we want to buy, and we want to invest in, and we want to make good.

And we still have that feeling of energy and drive that comes from having some investment, investing in journalism and in stories and in the magazine, and it's good.

What inspires you, design-wise?

Tibor Kalman, who is a New York designer from the '80s and '90s who did Colors magazine, and that was kind of my touchstone in terms of design thinking.

One reason why our magazine looks a little different than everyone else, I guess coming from a European background, my sources, the things I kind of tend to look at, tend to be European.

Turley has experimented with interesting color schemes, like the silver "Year in Review" issue and the neon orange lettering on another issue. More →

Is there anything specific you're proud of having worked on here?

I think as a department, we're most proud of our end-of-year chart issue.

That was a real moment for us, particularly as a department, but I think also as a magazine, that we could show that we could do something different -- tell stories in a different way, to have the confidence to get rid of the entire book.

That was a real moment for us and gave the design department a real sense of confidence about what they're doing, and it was really well-received.

Can good design help sell a magazine?

I think good stories sell magazines better than good design. At the heart of every magazine has got to be its journalism.

I think it probably helps, I mean certainly a good cover helps. But then I don't think there's necessarily a prescription for what is a good cover. i mean, a good cover might be putting Oprah on the cover. That's probably going to sell more copies than however great my idea is.

I hope it can help, there's not much point in me doing this, if I don't contribute a little bit to sales.

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One of Turley's favorites, the Year in Review charts issue cover.

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A very cool chart: 365 days of Steve Jobs. The circle "graph" is Apple's stock price throughout the year. As a bit of a gag, this was in a section called "Jobs," which also included charts about employment.

With neon orange print, this cover really caught our eye.

A bold spread featuring President Obama.

Bloomberg Businessweek

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Here's where you can see how Turley caters to two types of readers: Those who have time to process all the text, and those who just want a few nuggets of information via the stats on the bright tennis balls.

Bloomberg Businessweek

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For the Year in Review Charts issue, even the Table of Contents was a cool chart.